Christobel Kent - A fine and private place

‘He sounded — funny,’ said Giuli hesitantly.

‘Funny?’

At that moment someone came out through the school’s gate, and a cheer went up from the boys at the lamp-post. Sandro turned to look and saw that it was the lanky boy into whose eyes Carlotta had been gazing. Alberto the rich kid.

‘Call you back,’ said Sandro, stuffing the phone in his pocket.

The three overgrown boys clustered around the parked motorini , jostling each other, pulling on helmets. Without a moped of his own Alberto ousted one of his pals, taking control and forcing the kid to ride pillion.

Fortunately for Sandro the street was one-way, because it would have been impossible to manage a U-turn in the confined space; certainly not without drawing attention to himself. His tailing skills needed a little attention, that was for sure; a battered, nondescript motorino such as Giuli’s mightn’t be a bad idea, either. He sat withthe engine running until they went past, a cigarette clamped between Alberto’s lips as he talked around it, helmetless and entertaining his entourage, taking a hand off the handlebars to gesture in the air, the motorino swerving as he did so.

Not for the first time, Sandro felt a spasm of pity for little Carlotta Bellagamba.

At the bottom of the hill they swung through the Porta San Miniato, left past the little bar where Sandro had lost the plot, down the high-sided canyon of the Via San Niccolò, then a sharp right around the great bulk of the Palazzo dei Mozzi with its huge, studded door. They were on the Piazza Demidoff, overlooking the river, where the rich kids hang out.

The gang pulled up in front of what looked like a closed-up restaurant or club with shuttered windows, on the corner of the street; they seemed to be fishing through their pockets, looking for something. Sandro double-parked outside a bar thronging with outdoor smokers, and watched. The shuttered windows weren’t completely dead; a string of red fairylights twinkled along the top of the shutters, and there was a dim light visible through a glazed section at the top of the door.

Whatever it was the boys had been looking for — and Sandro guessed it was money — they found it. They were lined up at the door now, Alberto, the tallest by a head, in the lead, pressing a bell and talking into an intercom, and then they were inside, the boy at the back shoving a little to hurry them in.

Right, thought Sandro, with gloomy satisfaction. He knew what kind of place it was; he knew they weren’t in there spending their parents’ money on dried-up sandwiches. He knew, too, that if he went in after them, a man in late middle age on his own, he might as well attach a flashing beacon to his head and imitate a police siren.

He got himself a slice of pizza, returned to the car, and watched.

The afternoon faded. Half a dozen times Sandro stuck the key in the ignition, ready to jack it in. He was being paid to watch Carlotta Bellagamba, not her boyfriend, and he was being alternately chilled to the bone or suffocated by the car’s faulty, fume-laden heater. He thought of Giuli, wondered idly what Gallo wanted. It had been money for oldrope, that job; he supposed he wouldn’t mind another like it, running a few things through the system, checking credit and criminal records, following up references. He hadn’t even needed to leave his office.

Sandro knew he should call the man, and should call Giuli back too for that matter, but that would require him to climb out of the car and walk to the riverbank fifty metres away where there was a mobile signal, out of the lee of the hills and the stone mass of the Palazzo Mozzi. So he sat and chewed his nails, and wished he was a policeman again and his partner Pietro was sitting next to him, talking about food. And tried not to think about what it would be like returning to a flat empty of Luisa, for three whole nights.

At close to four o’clock she appeared. Not Giuli, not Luisa, but little Carlotta Bellagamba. The pink Vespa tilted around the corner, dangerously laden, Carlotta’s curls springing out from under her helmet. Two big carrier bags from a flashy chain store dangling from either handlebar, and another between her knees. She’d been shopping. Jesus wept.

Sandro killed the engine, which he’d had on to run the heater as the sun went down and the chill grew. He saw Carlotta smile as she spoke into the intercom, then she was inside. Shocked to breathlessness by the cold as he stepped out of the car, Sandro made the five, ten quick strides to the river. As he got into phone range he turned to keep the door to the club and the little Vespa in view.

‘And where the hell have you been?’ demanded Giuli, the instant she heard his voice.

‘You know where the Zoe is?’ Sandro said, and it was an answer, of a kind. ‘Lock up and get over here, and put some make-up on. I want you to play my girlfriend.’

When Cate had come for her interview at Orfeo last summer, it had been Dottoressa Meadows who’d picked her up from the station in Pozzo. The Director, coming to collect an interviewee. Cate had been surprised, and impressed, by this at the time: it had seemed to her a good omen. A sign of something democractic in the system, to be chauffeured by the boss.

But Dottoressa Meadows had barely even shaken her hand at the station, and said nothing, or close to it, as they drove, the car sweet with an expensive fragrance Cate remembered from her most sophisticated aunt’s top drawer. Now, of course, Cate knew — everyone knew — that Loni Meadows regularly found reasons to nip into town; that the big offroader smelled of her perfume because it had become to all intents and purposes her personal property. Then, Cate had ended up staring through the car’s high windows at the great sweeping hills, glittering in the heat haze, miles and miles without a single farmstead. On their way through the hills they’d passed at least one car wreck being examined by the police, only the car’s bonnet visible, thrust out from under a dense thicket of myrtle.

Was that why Cate didn’t remember the white truck she’d passed on her way to work, with its lifting gear and the police tape, until muchlater? Shock does weird things, they say; when someone dies, you might think about something that happened, oh, years ago, but what happened that very morning is wiped.

‘Her car came off the road, some time last night,’ Luca Gallo had said to their little group in the hushed dining room, his bright face solemn with shock, and still Cate didn’t make the connection; at that moment she’d been thinking, for some reason, that it had happened much further away. Not in the next valley, not barely out of sight of the high grey walls of the castle. ‘She sustained head injuries. With the cold — ’ and he had faltered then, perhaps at the sight of them all staring back at him, perhaps as the reality hit. It had been minus eight, last night; she’d have lain there alone, in the dark and the cold. Dying; dead.

An accident. Did all accidents feel like this? Frightening: the suddenness of it, the randomness? But if it had certainly been sudden, it hadn’t felt quite random to Cate. She was scared.

She might have done anything in the half an hour before she had to be outside Luca’s office; no doubt he intended her to complete whatever tasks Ginevra had for her and then come straight to him. Cate had got so far as retrieving a tray from the library, but when she came out into the wide hall something stopped her. A tiny gust of fragrance, no more than the memory of Loni’s scent. And she set the tray down carefully and before anyone could ask her what she thought she was doing, she walked up the stairs.

Softly she took two steps to the double doors that faced her, the doors that led to the double-fronted piano nobile apartment that Loni Meadows had appropriated for herself. One of the doors was open, just a crack.